Editing 2421: Tower of Babel
Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
The edit can be undone.
Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision | Your text | ||
Line 8: | Line 8: | ||
==Explanation== | ==Explanation== | ||
+ | {{incomplete|Created by a COLORLESS GREEN IDEA. Please mention here why this explanation isn't complete. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}} | ||
+ | The story of the {{w|Tower of Babel}} is the Biblical explanation for the existence of different languages in the world. In the story, humans endeavor to build a tower reaching heaven. Their arrogance angers God and prompts him to sabotage the project. He does this by "confounding their speech" (commonly interpreted as giving everyone their own language), inhibiting their ability to work together. | ||
− | + | In this retelling, however, the tower is actually finished. God is happy to receive the human visitors, and offers them a reward. | |
− | + | The party that ascends to the top of the tower consists of [[Cueball]], [[Megan]] and a curly haired woman, who may be the linguist {{w|Gretchen McCulloch}} as she was depicted in [[2381: The True Name of the Bear]]. | |
− | + | When the curly haired woman expresses her love of words, God offers to create a panoply of languages. Megan immediately sees the problems with this, but the word-loving woman is enthusiastic. Instead of a punishment by God, linguistic diversity is presented as a well-intended challenge. Megan then states "We should not have brought a {{w|linguist}}." This is a paradox, since before this day there where only one language, and thus no true linguists. Of course the curly haired woman may have studied their own current language, which would technically make her a [https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/grammarian grammarian]. But with only one language this could be said to count as a linguist. | |
− | {{w| | + | {{w|Phonology}}, a part of linguistics, is the study of the sound system used in a language or dialect, or of the systems that languages use to organize sounds. {{w|b:Conlang/Advanced/Grammar/Alignment|Morphosyntactic alignment}} is the grammatical relationship between the noun arguments to a verb — for example, between the two arguments (in English, the subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', and the single argument of intransitive verbs like ''the cat ran away''. |
− | The title text expands the joke by suggesting that the miscommunication caused by the Tower of Babel is not due to language barriers, but instead because | + | The title text expands the joke by suggesting that the miscommunication caused by the Tower of Babel is not due to language barriers, but instead because of intentionally meaningless sentences created by linguists to illustrate points about grammar, and identifies two famous examples of such . "{{w|Colorless green ideas sleep furiously}}", coined by linguist {{w|Noam Chomsky}} in 1957, is an example of a sentence that is structurally correct but contains paradoxes and meaningless comparisons: something cannot be both colorless AND green (see {{w|Invisible Pink Unicorn}}), ideas do not sleep, and sleeping is not generally done furiously.{{Citation needed}} That said, the sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is so well known in linguistics that a competition to make the sentence meaningful was held in 1985 and {{w|Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_furiously#Attempts_at_meaningful_interpretations|attracted a number of entrants}}. |
+ | |||
+ | "More people have been to Russia than I have" is a well-known example of {{w|comparative illusion}}. It sounds like it means something but, upon actual analysis, does not, although it could be interpreted as there being more people to visit Russia than the speaker owns, or has in their household. | ||
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== | ||
Line 41: | Line 45: | ||
:Curly haired woman: '''''YESSSSSS!''''' | :Curly haired woman: '''''YESSSSSS!''''' | ||
:Megan: We should '''''not''''' have brought a linguist. | :Megan: We should '''''not''''' have brought a linguist. | ||
+ | |||
+ | ==Trivia== | ||
+ | In [[2381: The True Name of the Bear]], sentences spoken by Gretchen McCulloch do not have periods at their ends, a fact which she mentioned on Twitter. However, in this comic, she uses periods, so her previous periodlessness might be a coincidence and not a trait of her character on xkcd. | ||
{{comic discussion}} | {{comic discussion}} | ||
Line 46: | Line 53: | ||
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]] | [[Category:Comics featuring Megan]] | ||
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] | [[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]] | ||
− | |||
[[Category:Religion]] | [[Category:Religion]] | ||
[[Category:Language]] | [[Category:Language]] |